Hi workspace devs, I just finished a rewrite of the Screen Edge handling in KWin [1] and now I want to tackle one of the long standing issues: hidden panel activation. For those who do not know the plans first designed years ago: instead of Plasma keeping track of where the panel is and reacting on the screen edge, we just let KWin handle this edge for Plasma and notify Plasma when the Panel should be shown. This brings the advantage that KWin and Plasma do not fight over the edge (normally KWin should win, though there are hacks to make Plasma win) and there is a consistent user experience on how to interact with screen edges.
The new architecture has been implemented in a way to make that possible and I have thought about how we can setup a protocol which does not only suit the Plasma Panel case but also the Gwenview fullscreen & co cases. As communication medium I propose to use D-Bus and not X11 for the following reasons: * make it easier to get the changes inside applications - they might not like plattform specific code * support features where there is not yet a window present, e.g. activating KRunner * obviously to have an easier way towards Wayland The protocol I would suggest is: 1. Application calls D-Bus function in KWin with the following information * which edge to monitor (left/right/top/bottom) * offset on edge * length on edge 2. KWin returns a unique identifier for the registered area 3. Whenever this area is triggered, KWin emits a dbus signal with the unique identifier as parameter 4. If the Application does no longer need the geometry it calls a D-Bus function for unregister the geometry with the unique identifier as parameter In addition both the Application and KWin should watch D-Bus for the other service going away. That is if the Application goes away KWin just unregisters all geometries from this Application, if KWin dies, the Application needs to re-register once KWin is alive again. The idea behind the identifier is to make it easy to have multiple applications overlapping the same edge. By emitting the identifier applications will only handle the edge trigger they actually need, but also no application can get the information which other applications have registered an edge and which area. The idea of offset and length instead of global coordinates is to better handle multi screen. It takes away the responsibility to unregister/register whenever the screen geometry changes. Also it's in preparation for Wayland where global coordinates should not be known to the Client. I'm of course open to any suggestion and are happy to explain the motivation in more detail. What remains to do is also moving the Panel glow from Plasma to KWin. I want to have this as a generic feature available for all edges. E.g. when approaching the top left corner it should start glowing. Now a stupid question: where do I find that code? -- Martin Gräßlin [1] https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/108513/
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